Coos Bay Man Sentenced for Structuring

Coos Bay Man Sentenced for Structuring

EUGENE, OR—Roger Paul Villeneuve, 72, of Coos Bay, Oregon was sentenced on Wednesday, January 14, 2015, to thirteen months in prison after pleading guilty to structuring a currency transaction. Villeneuve was given 45 days to self-surrender.

Federal regulations require banks to report currency transactions over $10,000, and willfully structuring a transaction to avoid a currency transaction report is a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

For the past 40 years, Villeneuve has worked as a private consultant and solicited investments for various gold and nickel mining claims located in the United States and Canada. When Villeneuve entered his guilty plea last September, he admitted to Chief U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken that in October 2012 he had advised an acquaintance to withdraw $9,950 in the form of a cashier’s check from Northwest Community Credit Union and told the acquaintance to keep the amount under $10,000 to prevent a currency transaction report.

The offense occurred while Villeneuve was serving a probationary sentence from a previous structuring conviction in 2011. In the previous case, he received a sentence of five years of probation. This time, he received prison sentences of seven months for the new offense and six months for the related probation violation, with the sentences to run consecutively.

This case was investigated by the FBI, Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation and the Oregon Division of Finance and Corporate Securities. Assistant U.S. Attorney William “Bud” Fitzgerald prosecuted the case.